87 pointsby danieltanfh954 hours ago14 comments
  • magnio4 hours ago
    If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...
    • axusa minute ago
      Thanks to your link, I read both. There's distinct information in each of them, I'd say its worth reading both.

      The blog author is an "LLM enthusiast", at a minimum I'll give them credit for pointing their agent at an interesting set of Wikipedia articles. Maybe a blog platform tied to Markdown format is going to produce similar looking posts.

    • RankingMember3 hours ago
      Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM? The topic seems super interesting otherwise and would benefit from the real human voice. OP, can you elaborate on why you decided to go this direction?
      • NooneAtAll319 minutes ago
        because it is a propaganda piece

        the cheaper it is made, the more effort can be spent elsewhere

      • 0x3f3 hours ago
        > Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM?

        What diference does it make as long as the content is interesting and the tone not grating?

        It's possible for a human being to use an LLM but guide it to a well-written piece that's worth consuming.

        • mingus882 hours ago
          The tone is grating. That’s why we notice it.

          If the LLM output was indistinguishable from real human text nobody would say anything, because by definition we wouldn’t be able to tell.

        • rubenflamshep32 minutes ago
          Nah, if a human can't be bothered to write it themselves, I can't be bothered to read it.
    • 2 hours ago
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    • ofcourseyoudoan hour ago
      The kneejerk accusations of LLM even when it passes easily-available tests is intellectually lazy and does not belong on HN.
      • l23k4an hour ago
        I think it'd be rather uncharitable to assume this was written by a human:

        >The error was not stupidity, corruption, or ideology, but a structural failure of the threat-detection apparatus to model what the asset actually represented.

      • NooneAtAll317 minutes ago
        > The methodology, not just the man
      • SirFattyan hour ago
        lighten up Francis.
    • douglee6503 hours ago
      So obviously generated
    • cryber3 hours ago
      This is an incredible piece of writing, to accuse it of LLM voice borders on sacrilege
      • 512akHaf2 hours ago
        It is LLM with a clever prompt that avoids the most egregious tells (though "load-bearing" appears).

        The number of times the article goes on complete tangents, introducing new irrelevant names and the general useless level of detail, all in perfect verbose English points to an LLM. So does the upbeat and persuasive style.

        If you write that level of detail, use a historian's style and footnotes. Do not use the synthetic LLM voice that is optimized for rhetoric.

        • js244 minutes ago
          Where the heck did LLMs (Claude in particular) pick up the "load-bearing" tic I wonder? I'm over a half century old and read a lot, and I don't think I've ever seen load-bearing used so much before I noticed Claude using it all the time a few months back.
          • onlypassingthru3 minutes ago
            Claude is obviously planning to become a structural engineer.
        • elevationan hour ago
          The thought occurs that some day we'll be nostalgic for the quaint LLM speak of yore.
        • danieltanfh952 hours ago
          I don't really think there's a tangential detail that is related to the message. Which one are you referring to?

          Also, the upbeat and persuasive style ... is my style kek, is it me being too pushy or?

      • idontwantthisan hour ago
        It’s barely readable. The way it flips back and forth “not this but this” instead of just actually saying anything is maddening.

        > Kimball was right at the level he was reading it, but wrong about which decision he was reading

        What the fuck does this sentence mean?

    • danieltanfh954 hours ago
      Unfortunately there is too much detail here for me to write more candidly.
      • magnio4 hours ago
        No worries, I don't mean to disparage your article. At least it avoids some of the most annoying LLMism I have seen, and given its length you must have put some effort into prompting, researching, or editing. Hope you will find your own voice as you write more and more.
        • rapnie3 hours ago
          Youtube these days is full of probably great and interesting documentaries, where people put a lot of time in, but when I hear these typical LLM narrations I can't make it more then a few seconds in, they are horrible.
          • ninalanyon2 hours ago
            I wish that YouTube would have some kind of indicator to show that the narration was synthetic and a setting to completely block such things.
  • Animats15 minutes ago
    That's fascinating.

    The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy. That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring. Nobody ever made a biopic about Charles Wilson, head of defense production at General Motors during WWII, and later US Secretary of Defense. Hyman Rickover, who headed the 1950s effort to build nuclear submarines and warships, only has a low budget 2021 documentary. Malcom McLean, who converted the world to containerized shipping and made low-cost imports possible, never got a movie.

    Those three people each changed the world more than any celebrity. They're well known in business history. MBAs study them. There are biographies. But no movie.

  • zasz3 hours ago
    I buy it that this guy is incredibly important in the history of aerospace engineering and the weapons industry, but the article seems like it's making an overly strong claim that the trajectory of American and Chinese tech development was so affected by Qian Xuesen. There are, after all, many other people involved in both trajectories. Would Qian have been so successful in China if the economic and political incentives to listen to him had not been there? Had Qian stayed in America, is there a guarantee that the infrastructure necessary to support his doctrine on technological development would have been available?
  • PaulHoule3 hours ago
    What became JPL had numerous colorful characters who had trouble with the security apparatus not least

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons

    who invented modern composite solid rockets and was also a collaborator of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.

  • arjie2 hours ago
    An error rate of 0 is unachievable. Given that, it’s a question of your tolerance for error and the consequences of the opposite kind of error. Given the numbers of people involved in the exchange the comparative value must have been quite clear to both parties.

    The Chinese outcome was not nearly so certain even in 1990, half a century after the events in question. The counterfactual that China could not have indigenously achieved this also seems unlikely.

    After all, the thesis is that Chinese leaders were so organizationally intelligent that they recognized key players that could implement century-long organizational methodology improvements. Given that they could get that far, it seems unlikely that they could not take the next step: that of recreating/finding a Qian Xuesen within their own country; like we found Oppenheimer.

    Overall, this seems like a strategic choice that played off roughly at the risk control level it was aimed at. You cannot judge decisions solely by outcomes.

  • delichon3 hours ago
    Reminds me of the results of a large Slavic country going to war with a much smaller, once subordinate, now independent republic that was the source of their best engineers.
    • selivanovp2 hours ago
      It's a false analogy. Ukraine was no such source. It's just happened after WW2, that as a part or rebuilding a devastated territory, plus a better climate, resulted in USSR relocating several of its best aero/space and in general military institutions to what is now known as Ukraine. For example, their space engines engineers were educated in Russia till 2008 at least, maybe even longer.
      • adampunk2 hours ago
        This is literal Russian propaganda.
  • ailunan hour ago
    Definitely a famous story that gets retold and almost mythologized in China. When I taught over there, several different middle school students independently told me about this story.
  • xbar3 hours ago
    That is a good piece on a truly major technology debacle. The title is overblown.
  • zf00002an hour ago
    I read the whole thing, found this fascinating.
  • 2 hours ago
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  • pickleglitch4 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • stevenwoo4 hours ago
      The destruction of the research and development education pipeline in the USA that took 75 years to build because “college and women and minorities bad/Israel always good” was vying for the title only a few months ago.
      • pickleglitch3 hours ago
        Oh, that blunder is so 2025. In 2026 we brought our A game.
      • MSFT_Edging3 hours ago
        Turns out there's a nice phrase that neatly describes these seemingly disparate trends.
    • samlinnfer4 hours ago
      It's one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in asia.
      • Imustaskforhelp4 hours ago
        unless you are Alexander the great and even then, your armies would get tired of fighting for so long for a piece of land far far away from their homeland and they would wish to get homes.
    • ericmay4 hours ago
      [flagged]
    • onlypassingthru3 hours ago
      Pointless? Have you noticed which energy companies are making record profits? Who is filling demand for oil & gas if the ME refineries are blown up or blockaded?
      • pickleglitch27 minutes ago
        Perhaps "for no good reason" would be a better way of putting it.
        • onlypassingthru12 minutes ago
          I think the record profits would be very good reasons. Using "Drill Baby, Drill" as a campaign slogan was not a pointless turn of phrase. Also, the world's largest proven oil reserves, which happen to be in Venezuela, are now de facto controlled and refined in... the US. Lucky coincidence?
  • Nasrudith4 hours ago
    I don't quite get why the author thinks it would be impossible to get a big budget nose-rub in the dirt to the security apparatuses about their incredible abilability to create self-fulfilling prophecies against themselves via bigotry. It isn't like it takes pentagon cooperation for history biopics, the tech is all old.
  • feverzsj2 hours ago
    Qian is a typical opportunist, who had been contacting ccp since 1930s. He was already away from military and academia for years, while pouring huge sum of money into his immigration case. After deported from US, his job in China was mostly management.
  • greesil4 hours ago
    I doubt it's the greatest given all that's happened in the past year. But it's certainly up there, no pun intended.
    • 0x3f2 hours ago
      It's hard to say how much it contributed to the pre-eminence of modern-day China. But overall the rise of China surely dominates anything that's happened in the last year. No other nation even comes close to vying for hegemony with the US. We could have another full-on Vietnam-esque quagmire in Iran and it wouldn't even be a blip in comparison.